Phase 4: Paper Locks
A/N: Hope you all enjoyed a lovely Memorial Day weekend and not only did something memorable, but also enjoyed the nice weather (if you had it) and remembered the meaning behind the holiday here in the U.S.
Thank you, oh great and powerful readers. Those of you who have been gracious enough to leave a review, thank you. Also, thank you to those who have put this story, or this writer, on alert.
And to those of you who have just hung around to read and left nothing behind, there's probably a Christopher Pelant keeping tabs on you. Wouldn't be better to just admit you were here?
oOoOoOoOoOo
He opened the door to Caroline Julian and blurted out the first question on his mind. "What the hell are you doing here?"
"You have a day off, I have lots of days off, now, do I really need an excuse?"
She breezed past him and headed straight for the kitchen. "Most hosts offer a lady a drink of some kind."
He hurried to keep up with her. "It's 11 in the morning, Caroline. Don't you think that's a bit. . . ."
"Water is fine, Cher. Or coffee would be better." She surveyed the kitchen table, covered with neat stacks of index cards. "You still working the case, Seeley Booth?"
He nodded, "Yeah, but I can't get near the evidence."
"That makes two of us."
Caroline Julian was a force to be reckoned with, usually, but in those 5 words he saw a different side of the federal prosecutor.
"You got to be kidding me."
"No, cher," she said as she headed toward the coffee maker, "I am officially out of a job. The bar association has decided to suspend my license rather than revoke it entirely, but it kind of puts a damper on being a federal prosecutor."
He closed his eyes and exhaled, feeling deflated. "I am so sorry, Caroline."
She waved off his concern as she began opening cupboards. "Where do you keep your coffee? If we're going to look through your index cards and figure out our next move, I need some good, strong coffee."
He crossed to the refrigerator and pulled out the canister of the Kona blend Bones had bought him from the freezer.
"Don't tell me, you get a better brew that way." One eyebrow went north as the line of her mouth went south. "Something that genius partner of yours come up with?"
He ignored her comment. "Sweets had two other FBI profilers take a look at Ethan Sawyer's therapy tapes and they concluded he wasn't talking about our daughter." Leaning against the island, he watched her at work. "Beyond that, there isn't much new that I know of. I'm still on desk duty."
"You have filters for this thing?" She looked at the coffeemaker and began tapping it. "You sure this thing isn't some kind of newfangled rocket ship destined for the moon?"
With a practiced hand, he opened the filter drawer and showed Caroline the new filter there before measuring out the coffee.
This time she was watching him as he began to fill the pitcher with filtered water.
"A little birdie told me that Angela still can't figure out how that videotape was altered." She harrumphed. "That concludes catching up on the evidence." She then slapped him hard on his arm.
"Hey, what the hell? What was that for?" He rubbed his arm which stung horribly from the assault.
"That was for your genius partner talking to that other genius and pissing off a third genius who is now probably conjuring up some other kind of murdering hacking scheme that we can't stop because he's sidelined us with phony charges and whatnot." She drew in a deep breath and he readied himself to be struck again. "What the hell was she doing talking to a paranoid schizophrenic anyway? Doesn't she have enough crazy types in that lab of hers to talk to? Why was she talking to that man anyway? She won't talk to Dr. Sweets, she has to talk to a crazy person about another crazy person?"
He waited, but Caroline simply grimaced and then did something he hadn't expected could follow such a barrage.
"I'm sorry, cherie, but. . . ," and she threw up her hands and silently went to the kitchen table and sat down, speechless.
Booth considered his options. The former prosecutor looked spent, almost defeated. He felt the same thing, almost straight through to his bones. He eyed the coffee and considered the whiskey, but threw away that option as just as useless as reviewing the evidence he'd managed to gather before being removed from the case. Instead, he retreated to the kitchen table and sat down heavily.
"You know what the problem is, cher?"
He rubbed the sore spot on his arm and hesitated before shaking his head.
"Neither one of us has a good idea what's going on inside of the heads of those geniuses."
"What?" The coffeemaker began to hiss and he was seriously considering the whiskey.
"Why was your sweetheart partner there talking to Ethan Sawyer anyway?"
"He was a genius mathematician. . . ."
"I know, I know all that," she interrupted. "They weren't, you know, in the past, I mean. . . ?"
She'd let the question linger in the air. In court, she wouldn't have pulled her punches.
"No, they were just old friends. She thought he could give her some insights into Pelant. All we got was that code on the wall that no one's been able to figure out."
She sighed. He sighed.
They had nothing new.
"Well," said Caroline as she stood and walked over to the coffeemaker, "that was a productive first meeting of the minds."
oOo
"You should have told me, Jack."
She watched as her husband knelt to retrieve the broken remains of the rose he'd been pampering the last few days. She hadn't understood the process, hadn't understood at all how removing the petals from his prized rose was going to create another rose, but she had long ago left botany and bugs to him.
"You really should have told me, Jack. I wouldn't have let Michael near it."
She watched as he almost lovingly cradled the now-destroyed experiment and laid it to rest in the small bucket he kept for his clippings. Michael stood clutching her side, not sure what to make of his father's reaction when he had suddenly spun around and then crashed into one of his father's plants and caught his shirt on a thorn and twisted further to tear off an already ratty looking stem.
"No worries, Babe." He opened up his arms and beckoned Michael to come to him. "It's okay, Buddy. It's just going to take a little longer to create Mom's rose."
"A rose?"
"Yeah." Jack smiled as he hugged Michael. "A miniature rose. A Vision of Angela. Or Angela's Vision."
She sighed and couldn't help but smile. When she first met him, Jack Hodgins was a man hopelessly at war with the world. But somehow she had unlocked the Jack Hodgins who was just hopelessly romantic.
"Well, next time we'll be more careful, right Michael?"
To seal his agreement, Michael placed slobbery lips on his father's cheek and produced something akin to a raspberry.
"All right, Buddy, the rose will grow back. I wasn't really sure I was getting the. . . ."
"And you know, you really should have told me about that other thing, too."
If she hadn't been so shocked, Angela would have hugged her best friend's father, wrestled him to the ground then pummeled him into telling her about Brennan and Christine. As it was, she had said nothing, only stared open-mouthed at the man who nodded and took off with a wave of his hand and was gone almost as quickly as he appeared.
This smile was not the same kind of smile he'd given his son. This one was muted, almost thoughtful.
"Ange, I didn't know if he was going to show."
"You could have warned me. One minute he was there. . . ."
". . . And the next minute he was gone." He straightened up and swung Michael onto his shoulders. "He is a aiding a fugitive." He began his nightly ritual of playing horse—or Equus ferus—to Michael's rider.
"So he shows up and that's it? We don't get to ask him questions? We don't even get to know what he wants?"
"Ange. . . ."
"My best friend was framed for murder and she's on the run with her kid and the only person who has any idea of where she is or if she is alive says, 'My granddaughter likes rabbits' and then takes off and you let him?"
"Whoa, there, Buddy." Jack turned from bouncing Michael toward the house. "What did you want me to do, Ange? Tackle the man?"
"Yes!"
Jack laughed. "Angie, I didn't think you were impressed by brute force." He looked up at Michael. "I don't think it would be a good idea for Michael to see me beating on an old man."
"How long have you been communicating with him?"
"Ange. . . ."
"You've been communicating with him since the beginning of this mess?"
"No." He stopped, but Michael kept bouncing on his shoulders. "It's better if you don't know those details."
But Angela was all about the details. "Aren't you curious about what he wanted? Why he's here? What's going on with Brennan? Where Christine is?" She waited for his response, but when he remained silent, she offered her own. "Well, I am."
Jack smiled and she wondered if the world was going crazy.
Or if she was.
"Where did we go after Max left?" His tone was entirely too reasonable.
"The barn. The Kid's Farm." Exasperated, she put one hand on her hip and struck a pose that dared defiance. "We saw the rabbits. The silver fox rabbits. I read the description. They hopped around. What was I supposed to get from that? Morse code? One hop, a dash? A rest, a dot?"
"An-gie," Jack emphasized both syllables. "If we get a special visitor like that, he's going to leave us something."
"So we're back to the silver fox rabbit?" She groaned and sighed at the same time which elicited a giggle from her son. "What is he, the Easter Bunny? He didn't have a message taped to his tail and I sure as hell didn't speak to us. Is this a poop thing? We have to check the jelly beans he leaves behind?"
"Nope," said Jack reaching into his pocket. "Just one of these, taped to the fence stiles by the rabbit enclosure." He held up a USB drive. "And I left one for him by the orangutans."
oOo
"All this because he said 'he' a couple of times along with 'it' to describe this demon thing?"
Lance Sweets gave a single nod and waited. The large conference room had never quite seemed so small and claustrophobic. Trying to convince Booth that they had a means back into the case had been fraught with its own kinds of difficulties. Today's little exercise was, he hoped, more than an exercise in futility. They were stalemated with the evidence piled up against Dr. Brennan, so much so, that Agent Flynn had stopped looking elsewhere. But if he could just persuade the man there was a reasonable alternative to the evidence at hand, maybe they could press on. He had two other psychologists who agreed with him. All he had to do was. . . .
"Wait," said Agent Hayes Flynn, "I get it. You want back on this case."
"Yes."
"To prove Dr. Brennan's innocence."
"To get to the truth." He did not break eye contact with Flynn, refused to back down. The agent was staring right back, but he could see the man was considering the idea. He'd skimmed through the two reports, read through the findings pages at the end of each and had allowed him to repeat how he caught Ethan Sawyer's use of a male pronoun in describing the baby.
Flynn laid the report he'd been reading flat on the table and let the pages fall soundlessly close. "You want to go back through all the evidence? See if something was missed?"
Sweets drew in a breath and steadied himself. "The psychological profile you have on Dr. Brennan shows her to be hyper-rational, deliberate, exacting. Fiercely protective of her family or friends. You've had a chance to read it all, even had the profiler read through her books to draw insights into her mind. And while it is entirely possible that Dr. Brennan could commit murder to protect her family, it's not probable. "
"It's not probable?"
"Dr. Brennan does the work she does out of a strong moral conviction that to do so says lives by preventing the murderer from committing future murders. She also has a strong desire to see that justice is served. Her thinking generally is in terms of black or white. Only in the last few years has she even acknowledged the concept that gray areas exist. It is my studied opinion that Dr. Brennan could not commit murder because it would run counter to that moral code."
The agent's expression hadn't changed. "People step away from their moral code daily. Your impromptu profile, Doctor, still makes her a good candidate for Sawyer's murder."
"How about this? Dr. Brennan knows exactly how the lab works, what each person's responsibilities are. This murder was almost textbook—man dumped in the woods to be eaten by wolves. Given a paralytic agent to make him appear dead and cut so that the wolves would be drawn by the scent of his blood. Dr. Brennan's murders in her novels are more complex than that. Besides, knowing as much as she does about murder, the best murder is one in which no body is found. Wouldn't it be entirely within the realm of possibilities that rather than thinking she could convince people at the Jeffersonian to cover up for her, which is the only way she could have gotten away with the murder, that she would have devised some way in which the body was never found?"
"The arrest warrant was issued based on the evidence, Dr. Sweets. She was our best suspect."
"I know." He sat back and tried to maintain his neutral tone. "But there are alternative explanations for the evidence. I just think we owe it to seeing that justice is truly done in this case to. . . ."
". . . Look at all the evidence again." This time Flynn sat back in his chair. "Only a fool or a crazy person would carefully, almost painstakingly gather and document the evidence against herself. From what I've learned of Dr. Brennan, she's neither one nor the other."
Sweets bite back a triumphant, "Yes!" and donned his most professional tone. "She is a genius."
"I know. IQ off the charts. Same as this Christopher Pelant." Flynn quirked an eyebrow. "You didn't think I was paying attention? There are plenty of people here who think there's a fine line between genius and insanity and wouldn't put it past someone like Dr. Brennan to kill to protect her family. Some even think she did it, crossed the line, so to speak. Post partum insanity."
"And there are probably more people here who think she didn't do it." Flynn tapped the report on the table. "Hoping she didn't do it. Her record here as a consultant with the FBI is damned impressive."
"So, I can re-work the case?"
Flynn bobbed his head. "Re-work it, take it on a date and bring it flowers it you want. But no Booth. He's not to touch anything related to this case."
"He's been cooperative."
"He's too close."
This time, Sweets' head bobbed in agreement. "I'd like Agent Shaw to assist."
Flynn chortled. "You want it all, Dr. Sweets, don't you?" He pushed the reports toward Sweets. "Take Agent Shaw. She knows the Jeffersonian, they know her. Keep this a closed loop and me in it. Understand?"
Sweets contained another urge to shout but simply nodded. "Understood."
oOo
She could tell something had shifted when she walked into the lab that morning. Usually she just felt the smooth lines of the place in the mix of architecture—Jeffersonian old paired with Medico-Legal Lab new—played out in the quiet efficiency of the place. It had always been that way, professional and productive, old school science tempered with new school technologies.
But today it was. . . noisy.
Not everywhere, no, just coming from the one place that she did not expect noise.
"Angela?"
The artist filled her office with a strangely engaging musical selection, part reggae, part African rhythm, part. . . .
"Cam?" Angela pressed a key on her keyboard and the rich beats faded into the background. "I'm sorry, I was just. . . . Is there something you needed?"
It had been a long time since she'd seen her forensic artist smile like that or heard wild rhythms or driving beats come from her office. "I take it you had a good time at the zoo yesterday."
"Why would you say that?"
And in a microsecond, Angela had gone from the Angela of old, carefree and open, to the new Angela, suspicious and closed-off.
"Nothing." Cam drew in a deep breath and just decided to brave it. "You just seemed more yourself. Usually I come in here and you're frustrated over something to do with the Sawyer case."
Being from New York, Cam didn't often find herself using or even thinking the expression, but it seemed to be a deer in the headlights moment. The artist stood and stared before sputtering about wanting to try out a new singer and something about a broken rose and Saint Gold something when Hodgins walked in, an open laptop in hand and a boyish enthusiasm she hadn't seen from him in a while. "Ange, you've got to see. . . ."
And then it happened. Her second deer in the headlights sighting of the morning, this time with a dumbstruck Hodgins.
"All right, people," Dr. Cam Saroyan, "what the hell is. . . ."
And then she had her deer in the headlights moment as she glanced at what was on the laptop monitor in Hodgins' hands.
"Oh, my God."